Rebel Music : Music and the Roots of the New Muslim Youth Culture (9780307908681) by Aidi Hisham

Author:Aidi, Hisham [Aidi, Hisham]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780307908681
Publisher: Random House Digital
Published: 2014-03-04T05:00:00+00:00

Jinn ’n’ Juice

Arab and Pakistani Muslims have a significant presence as owners of gas stations and convenience stores in America’s inner cities, particularly in the midwestern cities of Detroit, Chicago, and Minneapolis. Syrian immigrants began setting up grocery stores in Detroit in the early twentieth century; with the white flight that followed the city’s riots in 1967, Syrian and Iraqi store ownership increased. At one point in the mid-1990s, 80 to 90 percent of the gas stations and grocery stores in metropolitan Detroit were owned by Chaldeans—a community of Iraqi Catholics (who as Christians were permitted to sell alcohol back in Iraq, and brought that specialization to the U.S.), but as more Muslims migrated from Iraq and Lebanon to the Motor City, the stores passed to the hands of Muslim entrepreneurs. A body of sociological literature has emerged, trying to understand the phenomenon of the “middle-man minority,” wherein an immigrant minority, using its transnational ties, creates a niche in a particular business (grocery stores, gas stations, fast food), and ends up standing in between the majority population, which dominates the economy, and their customers, who are nonwhite but of a different ethnicity than their own. Yet having Muslims selling liquor in the American inner city brings a new dimension to this question.

Rola Nashef’s award-winning film Detroit Unleaded, a love story about two youngsters who are forced to spend hours in their parents’ gas station—“the cage,” as they call it—subtly captures the tense relations between Middle Eastern gas station owners and their African-American customers. Lodged in impoverished, high-crime urban areas, the gas station owner will view every patron as a potential threat, selling goods and receiving money through an opening in a sunken portion of the counter, protected by a sheath of bulletproof glass. Neighborhood residents see the bulletproof glass as a symbol of the separation and distance that Muslim entrepreneurs wish to put between themselves and their customers, while the store owners see the two-inch glass as a virtual prison in which they’re held for long hours every day. The film has no villains, depicting the humanity of blacks and Latinos who live in these urban wastelands, showing how the daily interactions between store owners and customers take place within the racialized and restrictive confines of the ghetto, and capturing young Arab-Americans’ racial in-betweenness. The Lebanese and Iraqi kids hate working at the gas station and having to mediate between their parents and African-American and Latino clients. “I see ‘the cage’ as a metaphor,” says Nashef. “The liquor store where these kids find themselves working under their parents’ orders is a metaphor for the generational divide, the multiple restrictions facing Arab youth, and the Arab community’s place between black and white.”

The troubled relations between immigrant entrepreneurs and the often black and Latino majority communities around them have at times erupted into violence, as in the Los Angeles riots of 1992. This hasn’t happened in Detroit, but this situation where the immigrant Muslim store owner feels threatened by his customers, and

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